


Regrets, otherwise engaged

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: 1970s, Christmas Party, Drunkenness, F/M, First Kiss, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-03
Updated: 2015-12-03
Packaged: 2018-05-03 21:07:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5306789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patrick ends up enjoying a Christmas party at Trennels. Eventually.</p><p>Content notes: sexism, homophobia, mention of institutionalisation for mental illness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Regrets, otherwise engaged

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dashi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashi/gifts).



> Set Since the War; usual Marlowverse fudges apply re: Dartmouth and some other matters. For Those Who [...] Prefer Accuracy &c., three years post-canon, roughly on the _Ready Made Family_ timeline.
> 
> Thanks to [fengirl88](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fengirl88/works) for beta reading.

Of all the grotty debauches one was expected to show up at over the Christmas season, Patrick loathed the Trennels bash the least; his own family’s Twelfth Night hooli very much not excepted, especially this year, when Mr Merrick’s absence (East German trade delegation, welcoming committee) was to propel him into the position of host. He cringed at the prospect of _polite conversation_ , the courtesy of which seemed to subsist in changing subject or interlocutor the moment either became remotely interesting, the dance obligations to awkwardly virginal or officiously matronly partners, and worst of all, one’s horrendous, perpetual _visibility_ to everyone.

The Marlows’ party, as befitted the most recent of the locality’s Yuletide institutions, was also the smallest and most informal. They reserved their splurge for a barbecue and midnight steeplechase at Easter, and very sensible of them it was too. Patrick grinned ruefully, conceding to himself that his approval might just have something to do with never having placed lower than third in the steeplechase, though Pam Marlow’s appearance in a scarlet silk smoking jacket, nightcap perched atop her riding hat, was also a reliable treat. Of their Christmas do you could expect no more than an LP of Christmas kitsch popping and scratching on the record player, Mrs Herbert’s dense fruitcake and feather-light mince-pie pastry, and a steaming bowl of punch, never less than robust, rising lethal if Giles or Peter were around to abet Rowan in its concoction. 

Entering the drawing-room, he saw that this year both of them were, which hadn’t been the case since―he shivered with a marrow-deep chill despite the press of guests and the merry blaze in the grate. He supposed Rowan at least must know, from roughly the same sources as he did himself, that Judith Oeschli had been repeatedly sectioned and was now more or less a permanent resident in St Ann’s in Poole, but did the others, more frequently away from home and Westbridge gossip? He recalled himself from the thought of high wire-mesh windows and linoleum before the threatening swell of helpless panic could break. He began to work his way over to the punchbowl and Peter, who clapped him on the shoulder. 

‘Merry Christmas―how’re the fenny wastes treating you?’ 

‘An inordinate quantity of sky, and you could wish something more substantial between the Urals and your backside when the east wind blows, but so far surprisingly jolly. You?’ 

‘Oh, you know, the Ship is eternal―the more things change, the more they―can’t wait to get shot of it, frankly. None of us can. Speaking of, Patrick Merrick―Clem Selby.’ 

He indicated the compact, muscular person to his right, crisp but comfortable in a damson-blue crew-neck and grey twill slacks, his dark curls artfully cut to comply with armed forces standards while suggesting a fashionable civilian minimum (which should have looked neither fish nor flesh, but didn’t). 

‘How d'you do?’ Selby smiled, displaying rather extraordinary Terry-Thomas teeth, and offered a blunt, well-kept hand. 

Peter looked as proud and anxious of his friend as if he’d just hatched him. Patrick remembered something Nicola―where was Nicola, anyway?―had said ages ago, that Selby, following hard upon the succession of sneaks, bullies and thieves inexplicably befriended by Peter at prep school, had permanently endeared himself to the family simply by dint of refreshing normality. Having been, at certain bops and tea-parties, and once or twice at Fisher House, on the business end of just such casually intent, appraising looks as that with which he was now favoured, Patrick was prepared to wager that there was at least one way in which Clement Selby wasn’t _normal_. And then, with a sensation like the impossible, preposterous clarity attending his first independently and successfully solved differential equation, it occurred to him what that, alongside Peter's mother-hen demeanour, actually _meant_. He found himself without warning almost insupportably touched. When Peter was happy his resemblance to Jon―always the nearest of all the siblings’―became overwhelming. He handed Patrick a cup of punch, heady with rum. 

‘Good health. Where’s Nick tonight?’ 

‘Ferrying lost souls from Colebridge and environs. We’re taking advantage rather of the shiny new driving licence―no, I tell a lie, there―’ 

Patrick saw Nicola, preceded by the Cropper sisters and a pasty youth who might have been a Lidgett, briefly survey the room as if it were a particularly tricky harbour entrance before stepping into her social self, laughing, enquiring, exchanging kisses and handshakes. How curious, that even outgoing people did that, put on a version of themselves. Nicola’s fit her like her velveteen jacket, man’s pleat-front dress shirt, wide belt, maxi-skirt and pigskin boots: assembled gradually and from a variety of roughly recognisable sources, acquired sometimes with fortuitous ease and sometimes with considerable labour, but determinedly, unmistakably her own. 

A mild constraint had existed between them for over three years now: owing, Patrick realised, more to his sensitivities than hers. After the Ginty interlude he had expected, with all the fatuous effrontery of sixteen, that their friendship would resume without hitch. It didn’t. The next summer, Nick had disappeared on a Sail Training Association course, and thereafter her holidays seemed to fill with tall ships, incomprehensible jargon and the sort of hectically committed socialising that people who do utterly exhausting things for fun often go in for. Her gracious but conscious attempts to include him in some of the less maritime activities she enjoyed with her new friends he chose to take as calculated rebuke for the Gondal summer, and declined. He’d then seen quite a lot of Becky Martin―much more, in fact, than he wanted to, for she combined insipidity with importunacy in unusual proportions, and in the end he’d had to be really rather brutal. 

At least Ginty wasn’t here; their agonised attempts not to coincide at the district’s various entertainments had evolved over the years into a brittle, hollow competitiveness at which Patrick was unsure of any but the showjumping bays, Ginty being a daring but imprecise horsewoman. True, he had made it to Cambridge as she had not to Oxford, but, disdaining redbrick, she’d taken a post with the National Trust, bumped into James Marsh-Downe at a luncheon, and charmed her way into helping that scandalous diarist edit his third volume for publication. She had been included in a house-party at the lodge rented by Marsh-Downe and his wife on the Duke of Beaufort’s estate, where she was at this moment, perhaps on her way to fulfilling Mrs Merrick's tart prognostications, though Patrick, who’d read the first two volumes of the journals, doubted the goings-on were of a sort to end in matrimony. 

And Peter―well, with the exception of their collaboration on that ill-fated canoe, over which harmony had been achieved mainly by Patrick’s determination to atone for the Malise business with meek submission to Peter’s testy, sling-bound directions, they had always fallen flat without the leaven of one or other of the girls. Patrick felt he now understood why―how absolutely foul it must be to have to hide a part of oneself but at the same time, just in case something did slip, continually semaphore uninterest so as not to scare the horses―he snorted at his mixed metaphor, earning an inscrutable tilt of the head from Selby, who was providing languid commentary on Peter’s jocose account of what the other absent Marlows were up to. Patrick couldn’t care less about Karen and Edwin’s High Table invitation (Pam in consequence at the farmhouse, baby-sitting overnight), Ann’s good works or Lawrie’s unexpected devotion to her wardrobe-mistress-cum-landlady in London, but he thought he’d absorbed just about enough of it not to betray inattention. Having a horror of crowding those who preferred not to have a third, he moved to do that grisly thing, _mingling_. 

At least souls in Purgatory have the expectation of joy in Heaven, he thought as he loitered on the edges of groups seeking an unobtrusive entrée, began conversations with an emphatic bonhomie that swiftly declined into sheepish exchanges of _oh well jolly good_ , chain-smoked to occupy his hands, awkwardly acknowledged and found an excuse not to tarry with Becky’s pink-rimmed, damply rebuking glare, from the relative eyrie of six-foot-not-quite-one misheard the diminutive and softly-spoken and was misheard by them, and received repeated calls from the spirit of the staircase. He glimpsed Rose Dodd, eyes sunken and inky with the strain of her first proper teenage party, in earnest colloquy with Selby, and fancied he caught the words _fighting at each other's side, might almost conquer all the world..._ half-deluged in that well-set young man’s peal of kindly laughter, but concluded he must surely have imagined that. Nick swung by a couple of times with a wave and grimace of _catch you later_. But by the time eleven o’clock came and the first round of departures began, the punch had done its disinhibiting work, and he was in the hall gabbling an indispensable anecdote concerning Lady Tennant’s latest run-in with the Bankside lot to Ollie Reynolds while Wendy called to her brother from the steps outside. 

Returning to the drawing-room, he saw Nicola at last at a loose end, contemplating replacing the Sinatra Family with the Swingle Singers, and too late to change his course, that he and a flushed, foolish-looking Jeremy Holden were converging upon her. 

Jerry brandished a dilapidated sprig of mistletoe. ‘How about a Chrimble snog, eh, Nick?’ 

‘Do you have to be quite such an odious lech?’ she said pleasantly. ‘I suppose you do. Go on.’ She tilted a screwed-up face towards his pitted one. 

‘Gawd, curb your enthusiasm.’ 

But before their lips could meet, an outraged shriek came from the approximate vicinity of the door. Jeremy jumped back, flinging the mistletoe in the air. Patrick, whose sharp reflexes only deserted him at the prospect of team games, caught it. 

‘Oh, _good catch_.’ The voice was Becky’s, a girlish pipe recently embellished with a wavering layer of Jane Birkin. ‘He can throw as well, or so I’m told,’ she remarked with the appalling conversational ease peculiar to those who have the natural capacity to hold rather more drink than is good for them. ‘Quite a _deadly_ all-rounder, the Merrick lad, but he hides his bird under a bush or whatever―minds his own _pidgin_ ―’ 

Most of this mortifying pronouncement, and Patrick’s wheeling to meet it with a drained, blazing glare was fortunately lost in Angie Allwood’s unsteady lunge at Jerry. 

‘You rotten, lousy two-timing streak of―’ 

Aiming for his head, she succeeded in upending her three-quarters-empty glass down his shirt-front. A pathetic fragment of lemon lodged on one of the sky-blue ruffles. 

_And a most lovely lavender tie!_ boomed Ol’Blue Eyes, accompanied by shattering brass. The record player hissed into a silence to match that of the thinned-out company. 

‘Angie, don’t be bloody daft,’ Nick said, ‘it was just a joke―look, mistletoe―’ 

‘Not _you_ , you stupid cow. Don’t flatter yourself. He―he―’ she pointed at Jerry, ‘he says he’s been up at Jim Blake’s playing with his ham radio set when he’s been seeing that townie tart with the scooter and the―the― _eyeliner_ ―’ 

‘Penny’s not―’ Jerry began hotly and ill-advisedly, ending feebly, ‘I haven’t been, honest. I swear on my―’ 

Angie made a noise worthy of Eliza Doolittle and went for him again, more for form’s sake than anything, then sank to the floor at the base of one of the Chesterfield chairs. Becky hurried over to commiserate, sparing for Patrick a look of perfectly seraphic exultation. Jerry hovered, making self-exculpatory noises―she’d never given him to understand they were _serious_ or anything, how was he to know who else _she_ was going with―to which the girls disdained to respond with anything more than hostile stares. 

‘All right, folks,’ Rowan interjected, ‘show over. Put that album on, Nick, or at least stop peering at it like it’s the Rosetta Stone. Patrick, chuck that mistletoe on the fire; if the dog gets at it there’ll be hell to pay. Move along, everyone, nothing to see here.’ 

There was, however, one more thing. ‘I feel _poorly_ ,’ Angie wailed. She keeled sideways out of Becky’s arms, vomited a gout of thin brown liquid studded with the usual unidentifiable orange blobs, and lay there groaning. 

‘Oh lor’,’ sighed Rowan, ‘as if the Marlow name weren’t already mud with the local constabulary. Binks, you can shut your mouth, Tom Catchpole as good as admitted that breathalyser was dodgy. Nick, can you haul her into the scullery? Black coffee and a bucket.’ She gave Becky’s incipient protest a straight look. ‘How is she getting home?’ Becky wordlessly jerked a thumb. 

‘Ah. You’d better watch out for PC Tom waving his little plastic bag, is all I’ll say, Jerry. And we’d better try and scare her up a taxi. Unless anyone here wants to take a chance on the health of their back seat upholstery and the wrath of Papa Plod? Mm, thought not.’ 

With a grin, Rowan turned to Giles, who, Patrick saw with fascination, was very nearly _dithering_. ‘ _Swabbing_ , I’m afraid, Number One. No way Ma’s _not_ going to hear about it, but all the more reason to present her with a cleaner carpet than she left.’ 

This was achieved with naval despatch and naval language, the latter not quite concealing Giles’s visceral recoil from the procedure, and the party resumed in the leaden, hilarious fashion of people determined to show they are having a good time despite everything. Becky and a stumbling, sponged-down Angie were duly delivered to Sammy Barnes’s Volvo. 

‘Sensible gel,’ Peter remarked lazily, toeing the peeling paintwork of the front door. ‘Can’t actually imagine a _better_ state to be in than half-comatose when old Sammy starts asking if you’ve let the Lord Jesus into your life.’ 

The remainder of the guests drifted off shortly afterwards. Patrick, who for all his frictions and infractions, or perhaps because of them, was considered _family_ both for cleaning-up and nightcap purposes, obeyed Rowan’s commands to fetch, heft and carry without thought of protest, and was rewarded with a substantial crystal brandy glass containing a measure to match. 

Giles and Rowan told Min. of Hung. and Wish. stories, Selby and Nicola argued softly about the Battle of Copenhagen, Peter frowned over the chess board. Some hazy, indefinable, and perhaps not very long time later, Rowan had disappeared, no doubt to make the last round of the farm, Selby and Peter were exchanging the arrant, half-incomprehensible pedantries borne of intimacy, Nicola was at the drinks cabinet, refilling her own and what Patrick guessed from his empty hands was his glass. Giles, absorbedly excavating his pipe, said suddenly, ‘Stay the night, if you fancy, Patrick. Can’t offer you a bed, exactly; the playroom's out of commission―ceiling down, carpet up―and Rose is in Ann and Gin's, but Selby’s displaced me into the boxroom, and you can shake down a sleeping bag in there, if you like.’ 

The walk back to Mariot Chase did suddenly seem very long, dark and lonely. ‘Mm, all right. Thanks.’ 

‘Hadn’t you better ring your people?’ 

‘They’re still in Hampstead.’ 

Nicola handed him another stonking measure and tucked herself solicitously around Tessa’s stiff, twitching limbs on the sofa. Regina’s demise earlier in the year had left the arthritic Afghan hound the sole survivor among Jon’s animals. Expecting the unfocussed, melancholy ache that such reflections usually brought, he was transfixed instead by fear, like cold steel thudding into flesh. _Timor mortis conturbat me_ ―so that’s what it was really like: not a pensive, half-pleasurable _ubi sunt_ sort of feeling, but a crude, poleaxing, emasculating wallop. 

The soft, lucid voice seemed to come out of nowhere, and for a delirious moment Patrick thought it Nicola’s, so similar was it in quality and tone to her nape-prickling solo in Wade Minster. But Nicola never sang unprompted, and the pitch and timbre, though high, were masculine. 

_Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies,  
Farewell and adieu, you ladies of Spain―_

The very last thing on earth that Patrick could imagine Giles Marlow doing effortlessly well―and he could imagine a lot, some of it more independent of adoring sororal testimony than he would like to admit―was _sing_. But he could, and was. 

Nicola’s mezzo soprano joined in with the refrain, harmonising closely and instinctively: 

_Until we strike soundings in the channel of old England,  
From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues!_

‘Thirty two and a _half_ ,’ Peter observed automatically. Selby cuffed him. 

For some reason the clear, impersonal catalogue of southern coastal landmarks induced the very nostalgia that a moment earlier Patrick had missed; his eyeballs were suddenly hot and brimming. The rudeness of leaving the room in the middle of his hosts’ song was as nothing to the alternative, so he muttered a phrase of excuse and bolted. 

The fit ceased as soon as he reached the lavatory. He leaned on the sink for a moment, and looking into the mirror above it, noted, not for the first time, that drink improved his looks, or maybe just his estimation of them. The curiously viscous tears had left his face unmarked, as those of grief, pain, or shame never did―but those latter could be restrained as these labile ones could not. He splashed his face with cold water anyway. 

In the hall he met Selby leaving the drawing-room. The final verse of the song rang through the open door; the tiled floor of the hall magnifying the uncanny similitude of the voices. 

_Let every man toss off his full bumper,  
Let every man toss off his full bowl―_

Embarrassed that the ribald meaning should strike him in this particular company, Patrick felt his lips stretch into an involuntary leer, and he shuddered. 

‘Blood harmony,’ Selby said. 

‘Blood―what?’ 

‘Blood harmony. That sort of shimmer you get when close relatives sing together, because their voices are so much alike. I met a man from the Appalachians in a pub,’ he concluded, as if that explained the phenomenon, and clicked the door shut behind him. ‘Fancy a cigar and a turn on the terrace?’ 

‘There isn’t a terrace.’ 

‘I don’t smoke.’ 

They loafed on the steps leading up to the front door, looking over the rimed ruts of the drive. It would freeze hard that night, but both of them were wearing coats of the alcoholic sort, warmer than furs. Off to the west side of the house stood the madly unlikely Trennels conservatory, the folly of Harry Marlow’s Darwinist, amateur-botanist son, Jon’s grandfather. It seemed almost to hover in the frigid air, whitewashed with moonlight. 

‘A miracle of rare device,’ Selby said unexpectedly, ‘a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.’ 

Patrick lit a cigarette. Selby turned to lean against the iron handrail, regarding him ruminatively. ‘You were rattled. When that girl with the fringe mentioned the pigeons.’ 

‘Oh―you know about that, do you?’ It came out more scornfully than he’d meant; in fact, he minded rather less than he could have predicted. If he’d had anyone to confide in he probably would have told too. 

‘Well. I have pigeons in the family. Opa―my grandfather, that is, is bonkers about racers. And so naturally when Pete―well, you know, sometimes you encounter brother cadets under conditions above all suited to―openness. Or perhaps you don’t know.’ 

Patrick felt he probably deserved that, and did not demur. Selby twitched his head in a _shall-we?_ gesture towards the phantasmal glasshouse. 

‘Mm, okay. I wasn't, really. Rattled by her, I mean. I just think that if you want to take a cheap shot at somebody you should use something―well, something cheap.’ 

‘If I may say so, the way Pete told it, it none of it exactly exuded high sparks of honour.’ 

‘N―o, but a person actually died―two people.’ 

‘I take it she _was_ embroidering?’ 

‘About my aim? Sort of. I brought the knife to the punch-up. Someone else threw it. So, morally speaking, she was pretty much spot on. Can’t say I care to have it noised about the district that I killed someone, all the same.’ 

Selby paused for a moment as if he were contemplating sharing a confidence, then seemed to decide against it. ‘It won’t blow up on you again after all this time, surely?’ 

‘It _could_ , I suppose. I think there’d have to be new evidence―and I don’t think there is, just Angie Allwood getting halfway conscious that grown-ups’ talk isn’t all impenetrable honking.’ He suddenly remembered Uncle Alex’s speculations and revelations, and grinned privately to think that if he were invited to the right sort of party, and he were the right―or wrong―sort of person, he could embarrass the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures really very spectacularly. Aware Selby’s silence had become mildly interrogative, he added, ‘but I wasn’t really thinking of it from the―’ he realised in the nick of time that he was about to say _Gestapo_ and substituted awkwardly, ‘coppers angle. Perhaps I should.’ 

‘Well, I’ve been blessed with uninteresting times, comparatively, but I know that one. It’s the last thing you think of actually happening, but it’s always _there_ , all the same.’ 

Patrick couldn’t think what he meant, and then he could, and felt heat rise in his cheeks despite the bitter cold. Glad thus to be reminded of the chill, because it gave him something to say, he stamped out his cigarette and proposed returning to the house. 

They turned to see Nicola standing in the doorway. She called out to them, ‘What on earth are you nutters doing? Nearly locked you out.’ 

‘Medium, strong, or Navy?’ she enquired―a pure formality―as they jogged up the steps. But by the time they had reached the kitchen Selby had inconspicuously sheered off back to the sitting-room. He wondered how Peter stuck it, all that intuitive self-possession. 

‘Oh, blow,’ Nicola groaned, staring into the fridge. ‘There’s only gold top. Do you hate it?’ 

‘Brings back my invalid years a bit, but I’ll live.’ 

‘At least try to like it. Mrs Bertie will flay us.’ 

‘Really? She doesn’t seem to type to indulge herself with Jersey cream.’ 

‘Not her. Cindy. The mog. Oh well, mutton and mint sauce.’ Nicola splashed it recklessly from the bottle. 

‘What do you make of Selby?’ she asked candidly, twitching at the gas ring, which seemed to have sustained some mysterious injury. 

‘A bit― _he was a man who used to notice such things_ , if you see what I mean. But I like him. A _terrifyingly_ good officer, I’d say; the sort you almost wish there was a proper war on for.’ 

He thought perhaps he’d said something dim; if people as close to it as Nicola ever _did_ wish that, or conversely, if they took it for granted. But she seemed to understand. She lit a match and turned on the ring again; it ignited with a small resentful bang. She dropped the saucepan onto it with a clatter, lowered the flame and sat opposite him at the table laden with glasses and crocks to be tackled, with Mrs Bertie’s help, in the morning. 

‘Unsettling, isn’t it? How he takes _care_ of―Pe―people. Imagine him doing it for a whole ship. Was he talking to you about the Monks’ Culvery thing?’ 

‘How did you―’ he said, meaning _how odd, you think of it as “the Monks’ Culvery thing,” like any local person, but then again, why wouldn’t you, when you weren’t there, and only have Peter’s facetiousness and Lawrie’s narcissism to go on?_

‘Because he talked to me in very much the same―about―some things that happened.’ Patrick’s mind sprang to the Gondal; he wasn’t at all sure he relished having that episode retailed to an outsider from Nicola’s point of view. Then, reproaching himself for self-absorption, he realised it was probably the wreck of _Surfrider_ she meant. 

Somehow the skeleton-memory of hard wood under his elbows and a crippling ache along his spine prompted unreserve. ‘Would you be able to wear it, if it were a friend of yours?’ 

‘Come again?’ 

‘Someone―taking responsibility like that. For your―your emotional life.’ 

She got up to stir the milk, which was beginning to diffuse its nursery aroma. He sensed she was embarrassed by the question, but nonetheless determined to take it seriously. ‘I expect I would be the one to do it, if it happened at all,’ she said after a short pause. ‘But I tend to make friends with the independent type.’ 

Patrick remembered the hawk-faced girl―Miriam―no, _Miranda_ ―at the last barbecue-steeplechase. On hearing that she fenced, he said he’d always wanted to try, and she’d bounded up, armed them both with long catering skewers, and given him an impromptu lesson. He remembered how her bare wrist and cashmere-cardiganed forearm lined up with the steel, and thought he wouldn’t mind playing Ferdinand to her, log-lugging and all, except she wasn’t that sort of Miranda, or, he sensed, interested in any sort of Ferdinand. Not like Ginty―he squirmed, and with a rough, hearty warmth borne partly of a need to dispel those arch, affected sessions in the walled garden, said, ‘I couldn’t. It would be like worming your way in. I could be someone’s independent type maybe.’ 

Her only response to this was to ply the wooden spoon more diligently. Unaccountably provoked, he volunteered, ‘I’ve sometimes―I mean, there are a couple of blokes in college one can talk to about serious things. Books, or the Church. Oneself, even, almost. But stuff that I’d feel the most monstrous clot telling them―I don’t always tell you, I know, hardly at all, one doesn’t―’ his voice rose and tightened as she stood on tip-toe to fetch the cocoa-tin from the top shelf of the cupboard to the left of the cooker, ‘I feel I could tell you and you’d understand almost better than I do myself.’ He wondered, instantly, if this were in any way true. It had seemed urgently so when he said it. 

She turned and looked at him, gripping the edge of the counter behind her. He could picture a couple of pistols in that broad belt, no trouble. 

‘I expect,’ she said deliberately, ‘that it’s because we talk piffle a lot of the time. Oddly enough.’ 

‘I mean, oh, I feel less different―well, anyway―never mind.’ A crawling, bristly sensation began to take its slow possession of him, the more complete because he wasn’t sure he’d wanted this, wanted _her_ , in the first place. 

She reapplied herself to the milk, then prised off the top of the tin. ‘Hand me down that rum.’ She indicated the bottle on top of the cupboard from which she’d got the cocoa. 

He stood up, feeling like the absolute dregs, a jumble of leaden bones in a shabby sack of flesh. 

‘Nick, I―look―’ he ventured as he stretched out his hand for the bottle. 

‘Oh, dry up, do.’ She slipped her left arm around his waist, so that he, lowering his right in surprise, was obliged to do the same, then twisted to face him, sliding her slender, flattish person between him and the worktop. She cupped his jaw tenderly in her right palm, and kissed him. _Never mind manoeuvres_ , he thought absurdly, but in fact there had been a certain élan in the execution that he didn’t want to interrogate too closely. Like all girls’ lips, hers were disconcertingly soft, but this felt as if it had happened before, which it never had with anyone else. That must mean something, he decided, and― _au douceur au commencement_ ―sought to deepen the kiss. The attempt was received, and repaid, with gratifying enthusiasm; his own, however, was becoming unconcealably manifest. He didn’t think Nick was the sort to cry holy and meek over that, but one never knew with women, better not push it. As he broke the embrace, she frowning strangely as if she were about to dive from a high board or an aeroplane, they heard a noise in the doorway. It was as impossible not to leap apart as to sneeze with one’s eyes open. 

‘We were beginning to think you’d gone to South America for the choc―oh, bloody hell. _Sorry_. Here, as you were.’ 

‘Binks―’ Nicola said, stepping towards the door, but Peter had fled. 

‘Oh, _shit_. Look, Nick, something you really ought to know―I absolutely always get caught.’ Patrick had a sudden barmy impulse to tell her about Claudie’s curiosity over his tears at the Albert Hall concert. 

Nicola started to laugh, weakly and convulsively. He made a soft quizzical noise. 

‘I was going to say, if you don’t have anything to hide, you can’t get caught. And then it seemed so impossibly priggish. Smug. _Virtuous_ ―like something Miss Keith might say.’ 

‘Actually, compared with some of your head woman’s sayings, that sounds almost sensible―I mean, as regards,’ he wagged his hand back and forth in a gesture of you-and-me, _us_. It felt surprisingly, astonishingly natural: _that not impossible She_. ‘If that’s not ghastly presumption. All the same, we could try one more exercise in delicious subterfuge, couldn’t we?’ 

They became aware of the scorched milk much, much too late to save it, and neither of them cared a bit.

**Author's Note:**

> Fisher House is the Cambridge University Catholic Chaplaincy.
> 
> The Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures at the time this fic is set was Anthony Blunt. He had confessed to spying for the Soviet Union in 1964, but this wasn't revealed to the public until 1979.


End file.
